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I wish I didn’t have to hide my truth, my pain, my journey, my story, my life.

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Mental health conversations have gone a long way but we’re not there yet. This is evident by the huge losses we had this week.

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One in five people in the United States live with a mental illness.

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In my eyes, the most significant aspect of mental health disorders is that no person’s symptoms are exactly like another’s – yet there is still a common ground that we can all relate to – pain. Pain is shared experience.

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No matter how much society has claimed to be enlightened, people still don’t understand what it is to be depressed, suicidal, anxious, or mentally ill.

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You can’t see depression like you can see a broken arm. You can’t touch anxiety like you can touch a sprained ankle. You can’t see mental illness so we pretend it isn’t there, we pretend that for a few hours a day that it isn’t there, but it is. It’s there and it’s real.

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That’s the thing about anxiety, no matter how irrelevant your problems seem to other people you can’t just make them disappear. They want someone who understands, not someone who tries to fix them and change them.